After the huge defeat of the so-called “personhood” ballot initiative in Mississippi yesterday, combined with the defeats in Colorado the past midterm and general elections, there’s good reason for Democrats to be giddy about the possibility that Personhood USA and its state affiliates might actually qualify similar extreme ballot measures in more states for the 2012 general election.

The Mississippi ballot measure would have given legal “personhood” status to undeveloped zygotes. There’s goes our 7 billion population count…

But seriously, Democrats might think about encouraging Personhood USA co-founder Keith Mason to continue to blame the defeat of Proposition 26 Planned Parenthood and other progressive pro-choice organizations and elected officials. As Mason explained to the Huffington Post:

It’s not because the people are not pro-life. It’s because Planned Parenthood put a lot of misconceptions and lies in front of folks and created a lot of confusion.

We’re not discouraged. It shows that the arguments that are being raised by Planned Parenthood, the scare tactics, and the second-guessing of Governor Haley Barbour did play a role.

Taking a page out of the RNC’s playbook when they helped to finance Proposition 209 in California in 1996, perhaps Democrats should actually encourage the qualification of personhood initiatives in Florida, Ohio, and other battleground states that permit direct democracy. Democratic candidates will have a clear wedge issue on which to run against Republicans. Wedge issues on the ballot have worked for Republicans in California and Colorado, as I write about in this 2001 article with Caroline Tolbert, “The Initiative to Party.” Ballot measures can also have “educative effects” that help Democratic candidates, most notably, the minimum wage issues on the ballot in six states in 2006, as we analyze in our 2010 article, “Direct Democracy, Public Opinion, and Candidate Choice.”

As a scholar of direct democracy, the more initiatives on the ballot, the more to study.